Textile Printing - A Historical Perspective (Traditional methods)

Textile printing is the most versatile and important of the methods used for introducing colour and design to textile fabrics. Considered analytically it is a process of bringing together a design idea, one or more colorants, and a textile substrate (usually a fabric), using a technique for applying the colorants with some precision. Several techniques have been used and the colorants available have multiplied. This chapter presents an overview of the changes that have occurred, together with an examination of some techniques that have almost ceased to be of commercial importance, for their own intrinsic value and because we can learn from the lessons of the past.

The desire to create garments and other artefacts that reflect the beauty of the world around us and provide for the expression of our artistic nature has been evident from early in human history. The decoration of the body presumably predates the production of clothing. Early men and women used the colorants that were available to them, such as charcoal and coloured earths (ochres), mixed with oils and fats, applying them at first with their fingers and sticks to a variety of substrates. Staining of fabrics with plant extracts provided a different approach; patterns could be produced by applying beeswax as a resist to the dye liquor or by tying threads tightly around the areas to be resisted. The realisation that certain colourless materials could be used as mordants to fix some plant dyes was a vital step in the prehistory of dyeing and printing. The discovery that different mordants, applied first, gave different colours with the same dye (for example, from the madder root) must have seemed litle short of magical and suggested a style of printing (the dyed style) that was to become of cardinal importance.

Where this style of printing originated – whether in India, Egypt, China or elsewhere – is not clear. Brunello states that an early variety of cotton dyed with madder around 3000 BC was found in jars in the Indus valley [1]. Taylor gives evidence of madder on flax found in Egypt and dated at 1400 BC [2]. In China the dyeing of silk was developed very early, and China is credited with the invention of paper printing and therefore may well have seen the birth of fabric printing.